Tag Archives: The Plurals

We’re very excited to announce that The Plurals and City Mouse will be touring together this February to San Diego’s beautiful Awesome Fest and back! We’ve got a couple quick jags through the midwest, a week in California, a dip into Mexico, and a world of shenanigans in store for this tour. Both bands have very fresh new releases on GTG (City Mouse’s Get Right and The Plurals’ Swish) so we’re stoked that they’re hitting the road together this winter. Big thanks to Raeghan the Savage for the tour poster! Check out all of the dates below:

Catch The Plurals live and grab a copy of SWISH on vinyl before its street date of September 1st! The midwest, west coast, and southwest are about to have to deal with all kinds of clowning around from the fuzzy punky trio. Check it out!

Our friends at New Noise Magazine were kind enough to premiere the new music video from The Plurals today for the BRAND NEW song “Overthinking.” “Overthinking” is the lead track on the forthcoming fourth Plurals album Swish (which you can pre-order here). Follow that there link up top for more info on the video and get ready to catch The Plurals on tour!

Lucky 13th of July, here’s a surprise release of a compilation of live recordings from last summer’s Red Teeth/ Some Plurals tour. This tour was in support of Red Teeth’s fantastic Light Bender 7-inch, with live renditions of all of the songs from that release appearing here in addition to other Red Teeth songs and a rendition of “Hey Sandy” by Polaris. Hattie and Tommy from The Plurals also performed on this tour as a duo and in collaboration with Ryan and Rael from Red Teeth, leading to some rare 4-piece renditions of Plurals songs. Two songs from the forthcoming Plurals album Swish appear here in different form along with older Plurals songs and a cover of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” by The Shirelles. Make sure to keep your ears peeled for some Tim Hoh spoken word cameos on some of the tracks too. Pay-what-you-want download available now, cassettes in collaboration with Tape Swap Radio, featuring live sessions each band did with them, will ship next month. Tune in to WLVU: The Sound of The Underground at 8 PM tonight to hear a special broadcast of the Plurals session we did with them on this tour! So many activities!

Today, May 11 2017, The Plurals play at Mac’s Bar in Lansing with Local H. Local H is a band that tours hard and has played pretty much everywhere and I’ve had several friends share the stage with them but this is the first time that The Plurals are in this position. In many ways it’s just another show, I’ve been playing for long enough to know that opening for a “national act,” even if it’s one of your favorite bands, rarely “changes” anything, but since this is something I’ve wanted to do since I was 17 I’m just happy to achieve a personal goal.

Local H are in a strange position as they had a moment of strong radio presence at the mid-90s height of “grunge” radio, but they never became top of the bill “stars” and have been in the trenches of independent touring basically since the end of the 90s and the collapse of the music industry as a relentless money vacuum. People that are just aware of their big hit or their minor hit sometimes, in my opinion, unfairly shove them aside with less interesting bands like Candlebox or Collective Soul or even Creed but while the lineage of flannel clad angst is indeed present in their music, a closer listen reveals that they have far more in common with the Replacements than Bush. I myself am not sure if their big hit “Bound For the Floor” really registered with me as a little Plural, but I do remember the now doubly defunct Lansing area alternative station 92.1 the Edge playing “All the Kids Are Right” a lot in the fall of 1998 as I was starting middle school and have always had a strong affinity for that particular tune. A definite lost classic of the 90s if there ever was one.

My love for Local H wasn’t cemented until I saw them live for the first time in 2005. By that point on the recommendation of some of my older friends I had their album As Good As Dead in my CD collection and I had impulsively picked up their 2004 album Whatever Happened to PJ Soles (sidenote – this album is a fucking masterpiece and I won’t hear a word against it; it’s a definite all-time favorite for me) when I unexpectedly came across it in the Ionia pawn shop but I (along with the other nascent Plurals and our friends that formed the original core of GTG Records) went to see them live largely because local heroes XU were opening the show. XU is another essay unto itself, but the main dude from the band runs the label Hot Capicola Records now. Anyway, this first Local H show was a revelation. They hauled their own gear, ran their own merch, had no crew, and played their asses off. Scott Lucas ended the show by crowd surfing to the merch table where he promptly began selling t-shirts. It didn’t seem like they were “has-beens” in any way, more that they had forged their own way after a stint of fleeting major label success. Can you imagine how huge this was to us, as teenagers just beginning to understand the idea of DIY music? These guys didn’t need anyone, and they still don’t. They largely self-release their music and while some of their albums have been licensed to larger labels, they certainly aren’t pandering to anyone else’s commercial interests. It’s no exaggeration to say that The Plurals and GTG would probably not be the same if we hadn’t gone to see Local H when we were in high school.

It didn’t stop in high school though. Hattie and I scrounged together our non-existent “savings” multiple times in our late teens and early 20s to go see Local H live whenever they were within 100-200 miles of us. We gave Scott Lucas so many Plurals CDs, not thinking about the fact that he was just getting burdened with more shit at his shows, but he always was polite and acted interested. So many Plurals “bits” are from the Local H playbook – at one show the fans voted on the setlist via a lottery system before the show, at another show they pulled one of their album titles out of a hat and then played the whole thing (they did PJ Soles that night and it’s still my favorite show of theirs in my personal history), at other shows they would have a “guest singer” come out and do pointless backing vocals but treat it like a serious and integral part of the performance, and, (all right) oh yeah, the Mr. Show references in song titles – but the performance itself from the band has never once been phoned in or jokey. As a teenager their music resonated with me with their early album themes about being a misfit in a nowhere town – in my forever dorky ways I relished the parallel that my nowhere town “Ionia” wasn’t too far off in name from their nowhere town of “Zion” – and I still get a kick out of this wry observance of the darkness in small town aimlessness, but their relentless work ethic and fearlessness in expanding their sonic palette has kept me a fan as I enter my third decade on this earth. We once covered their song “High Fiving MF” at a backyard redneck party at one of our first “shows” ever, an act that surely should have gotten our asses kicked, and now all these years later we finally get to be part of the show. And now they’ll know we’re lame!